Truth and Falsehood

Crowley's doctrine of truth and falsehood is easily misunderstood.
It recurs often in his system and is the central theme of his
well-liked poetic book of Qabala, the Book of Lies. Contradiction to
Crowley was not a problem but a sign of a higher mystical
understanding transcending the rational. Ordinary understanding is
held to be inadequate to engage Truth and in fact it is thought to be
in the way. A standard preparation for the Ordeal of the Abyss is to
constantly multiply contradictions in one's mind, each thought
contradicting the previous, until the trance known in yoga as samadhi
is attained. Every fixed idea is shown to be partial and false,
including ideas about the self, until finally the tyrannical usurper
Reason is dethroned and the True Will comes to take its place.

When considering issues of Crowley's apparent literalism there is
always the question of how literally he expected his statements to be
taken. He demanded allegiance to certain ideas but also insisted that
every idea must be doubted. To many Thelemites Crowley's declarative
statements are literal truth as well as higher spiritual Truth. To
other readers, Crowley was almost always joking and the reader should
always be looking for the joke.

In the secret societies studied by anthropologists truth is
relative to initiatory degree. The truth of a higher initiate is
incomprehensible to one of lower degree, while the truth of lower
degrees is understood to be false by the higher. There are elements
of this idea in Thelema as well.

One interpretation holds that Thelema contains a higher and lower
cultus. In this model the outer orders and lower degrees are targeted
at people who are not yet Thelemites in themselves, so they are
attracted by a devotional religion with traditional trappings and set
dogmas. At some level these people will see through these trappings
to the mystical Truth, as Crowley intended them to do, and at that
point they might or might not continue to hold a literal belief in
any part of the system. In this interpretation it might be considered
rude to interrupt the natural development through the devotional or
literalistic stage as the Skeptic voice seems to be doing.

The Literalist might say this: The Law of Liberty is the
Charter of Universal Freedom and the sole rule and guide of life in
this Æon. It is Truth on every level. While all mundane truth
is false in a sense, still there is the level of ordinary human
reality with its pragmatic rule of truth by which people can agree on
whether it is raining outside or whether the grocery store is open or
closed. The Law of Thelema and the Æon of Horus are inspired
mystical Truths emanating from the Third Order of A.·. A.·.
but they are also natural Laws and pragmatic human facts. There is a
definite Current of planetary Energy flowing from the Third Order
against which it would be foolish and self-defeating to struggle. It
is the Will of All to align themselves with this Current.

The Chaotic might say this: Crowley was an early shock
trooper in the ontological guerrilla warfare waged by people like
Brion Gysin, A. O. Spare, William Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Peter
Carroll, and Robert Anton Wilson. He wasn't afraid to directly
assault traditional value systems; he demonstrated the limits of
logic; he explored the distant cognitive frontier; and he insisted on
individual thought instead of dogma. He could sometimes forget his
own principles but that's part of the process too. At least he kept
his sense of humor!

The Skeptic might say this: Crowley's negative view of
intellect is comparable with Blake's view of Newton and Urizen. If we
accept that Crowley was in spirit a nominalist and freethinker then
it becomes possible to think of him as one of the highly
differentiated points on the existentialist spectrum, perhaps a kind
of occult Kierkegaard. Other existentialists also dedicated much of
their work to the reclamation and validation of denied or underworld
feelings. In this respect existentialists are related to the decadent
poets, of which Crowley was a late example. He might deserve more
study than he has gotten as a literary contributor but he does not
hold up as a philosophical contributor -- he was a sloppy thinker,
and he often allowed his doctrine of contradictions to degenerate
into a mere excuse for representing contradictions as paradoxes.

The Mystic might say this: Truth and falsehood as applied
by the intellect are uniformly false judgments when viewed from the
higher perspective afforded from the three supernal Spheres of the
Tree of Life. Real Truth is only known to the Master of the Temple,
the passive, observing, meditative Self first assumed by the Babe of
the Abyss who is born after the fall of Reason. Truth can only be
spoken by the Magus, whose development and grade follows the Master
of the Temple, but He is cursed to have His Word turn into falsehood
whenever it is heard. This Truth is beyond any possible description
in words but could be indicated as the Understanding of the perfect
integrity of the fabric of the personal psyche and the world that it
creates.